Some of the worst fears and dire predictions of opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline came true on Thursday when pipeline owner TransCanada announced that more than 200,000 gallons of oil had spilled from the existing portion of the Keystone system in Marshall County, South Dakota.

While the company reported the spill in a public statement, Buzzfeed notes there was an approximately four-and-a-half hour gap between when the company said the breach was discovered at 6:00 am and when local officials say they were notified at 10:30 am. As a South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources told the news outlet, “We’re not quite sure why there was a time gap in there.”

Outside of the company’s statement, there has been no outside or independent verification of the size of the spill or details about the scale of the possible damage.

Those who had warned against the pipeline’s approval for precisely these reasons and continue to work tirelessly to prevent the construction of the Keystone XL (KXL) project, were among the first to respond to Thursday’s spill.

“With their horrible safety record, today’s spill is just the latest tragedy caused by the irresponsible oil company TransCanada,” said Ben Schreiber, senior political strategist at Friends of the Earth. “We cannot let the world’s fossil fuel empires continue to drive government policy toward climate catastrophe. The only safe solution for oil and fossil fuels is to keep them in the ground.”

Rachel Rye Butler, an anti-tarsands campaigner with Greenpeace, noted that Thursday’s spill comes just days before the Nebraska Public Service Commission is set to decide on state approval for Keystone XL, which was ultimately rejected under President Obama but given a greenlight earlier this year by the Trump administration. “The writing on the wall to reject this pipeline could not be more clear,” Butler said in a statement. “These pipelines are bound to spill, and they put communities, precious drinking water, and our climate at risk.”

While we do not need more evidence to show us that pipelines are dangerous and must be stopped, more keeps coming. https://t.co/8PelLe6fLb

*Indigenous Woman Gets San Diego Support For Mexico Presidential Run
*What Democratic civil war? The left already won.
*Two months after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are still living in misery.
*‘Say Goodbye to Local Media,’ as Trump FCC Opens Corporate Merger Floodgates
*Pipeline news, Water Protector updates * More

Bernie Sanders was the keynote speaker for the Strafford County Democrats’ fall event, and he drew a large crowd, including many state Democrats.

The Martel Roberge American Legion Post was set up with 500 chairs, but Rollinsford Selectman Mike Rollo estimated 600 people were present.

Sanders talked about health care, education, workers’ wages and the politics of Washington.

“We can sit here and make fun of Donald Trump and that would be easy to do,” said Sanders. “What we need to be doing is focusing, and uniting so we can bring this country back to where it should be, to where all Americans have rights and not just the top tier. We need to not allow this administration to divide us on any level, not on race, religion, country of origin, color of skin or sexual orientation.”

Sanders said he came with good news and bad news out of Washington.

“The good news is that even though the Republican Senate has a 52-to-48 majority, in the last five months, they have tried and failed five times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That would have made 20 million people lose health insurance.”

Sanders said health insurance is a right for every American. He said the answer is to expand Medicare to everyone and bring in a single-payer health system. He said other countries do it and spend 50 percent less per capita than we do now.

“The bad news is that the Republicans just passed a budget, the ugliest and most destructive budget ever passed in the history of the United States,” said Sanders. “It is a framework and not a done deal and we need to work to defeat it because it is a moral obscenity.”

If/when video becomes available, I’ll have it up!

In the meantime, the rest of the days news will be in the comments, including:

*Sanders To Seek Senate Re-Election As An In Dependent
*2018 Candidates Hit The Streets
*US prepping nuclear bombers for 24-hour ready alert status
*Jimmy Carter says he is willing to go to North Korea on peace mission
*California fires took thousands of homes. Now rent in hardest-hit areas is soaring
*Half a Million March in Massive Uprising Against Spanish Plan to Overtake Catalonia
*Pipeline Updates, Waters Protector News & More

Jane O’Meara Sanders, the wife of Bernie Sanders, joined Maura Derrane and Dáithí Ó Sé on the Today show.

Dr Sanders was speaking ahead of her talk at Limerick’s Concert Hall as part of an Irish American festival.

She revealed that Bernie’s campaign was not supported by Harvey Weinstein, a well-known supporter of the Democratic party, and said that Weinstein advised the Clinton campaign on how to defeat her husband.

…

On whether or not Bernie would run for president in 2020 when he is 77 years of age, she simply said that they believe “age is just a number”.

More news, video, etc in the comments below. To become a commenting member (free of charge!), send me an email to the tpwhelpdesk at the googles.

Well holy crap, it looks like maybe some of my persistent tweeting on the Cathy Myers blackout may be paying off. ( yep, I’ll go ahead and take full credit for this just to boost my ego a bit). But Seriously… thanks Jimmy Dore!

It’s no secret that since the Randy Bryce rollout, his backers have done everything they can to pretend that the very qualified female candidate Cathy Myers does not exist. Given countless free airtime given to him by MSNBC in which his ad was run, appearances with Joy Ann Reid, write ups in Forbes, The Nation, Business Insider, Mother Jones, NPR and pretty much every mainstream and ‘anti-establishment’ outlets, Cathy Myers nor her ads (just as good as Bryce’s) have been featured in none of these places. Well Cathy is not having any of it and put out 10 tweets the pretty much demolish ‘Ironstache’ as the ‘best candidate’.

In the upcoming season premiere of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” Bernie Sanders does more than look at a printout of his family tree: He gets emotional when he discovers a relative died while standing up to the Nazis during World War II.

In a clip released to JTA, the Jewish lawmaker is visibly moved as the show’s host, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., asks him how he feels after learning about the relative.

“I’m proud of his courage, and willingly going to his own death in order to protect innocent people,” Sanders says. “So I’m very, very proud that I have a family member who showed that type of courage and decency.”

“It’s one of the bravest acts I’ve heard of,” responds Gates, a historian who has hosted the show since it first aired in 2012.

..

In the clip, Sanders goes on to say that he got involved in politics in part to “prevent the descent of humanity” into Nazi behavior.

“It just makes us realize how hard we have got to work to not descend into this type of barbarity and to create a world where people can love each other,” he says. “That’s what this reinforces in me.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is ripping the Trump administration for ending a key Obama-era immigration program aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children.

“Trump’s decision to end the DACA program … is the cruelest and most ugly presidential act in the modern history of this country. I cannot think of one single act that is uglier and more cruel,” Sanders said from the Senate floor.

Sanders added that the decision, announced this week by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is an “abomination.”

Senate Democrats have taken over the Senate floor on Wednesday to protest the decision to wind down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Democrats are demanding a stand-alone vote on the DREAM Act. Similar to DACA it would allow people brought to the United States illegally as children to continue to live and work freely in the country.

Sanders added that Congress should pass the DREAM Act “as soon as possible.”

Good morning friends! Below is some information on Ryan Stone, a Justice Democrat who is looking to take on Michael McCaul in Texas’s 10th district and then the rest of the news will be in the comments.

I’m a native son of Texas. Born in Nacogdoches, and raised in Canton, I worked my way through college and graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University. I worked a lot of different jobs along the way. I’ve waited tables, I’ve been a teacher, and I’ve been self-employed as a consultant coaching foreign business executives to improve their English skills. Today I am an accountant for a small business — and a city council member in Manor, TX.

Growing up in a working-class family in East Texas, I know first-hand what it’s like to struggle to put food on the table, pay bills and have to borrow your way to a higher education. The poverty I grew up with has, unfortunately, only worsened in recent years with the erosion of rural job prospects and an ever-widening pay gap. Although Texas has one of the most robust economies in the nation, many of our residents have been left further behind since the recession.

For years I’ve watched friends, family and community members suffer the effects of rural poverty and lack of access to quality healthcare. I see hopelessness and inequality as the unchanging condition for millions of Texans — tens of thousands located right here in the 10th district. Smart, capable, hard-working people strive to make a good life for their families, but they’re hemmed in by lack of opportunity, and priced out of an education that could be their only path to a stable income in the new, global economy. I want to change that.

Hello friends! Hope you all had a great 4th and are recovering well enough. As I catch up on the news this morning I’ll post the better findings in the comments and encourage you to do the same (as well as to write your own posts)! Until I figure out whats slowing us down I’ll skip the video of the day in the main-post to see if that helps a bit. Any issues can be reported in the comments, TPW-Mail, or tpwhelpdesk@[google].

While the Republican bill in the United States Senate continues to suffer from recent setbacks, residents of Wisconsin have remained committed to stop the Ryan-Trump Health Care Plan. At stake is the loss of health coverage for 22 million Americans, with a direct impact to Milwaukee’s underserved population.

One of the challengers for Paul Ryan’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democratic congressional candidate Cathy Myers, launched a petition drive to stop the roll back of vital ACA protections. The 1,600 signatures were collected to urge a No vote by U.S. Senator Ron Johnson.

“The Ryan-Trump Health Care Bill stacks the deck against working people, middle-class families, and anyone who has a pre-existing condition. Whether your health care covers patients with genetic disorders as rare as Jack’s or people who have undergone routine C-sections like myself. The bottom line is that this bill touches all of our lives, and so many stand to lose.”

Among those supporters delivering the petition was a 9-year-old boy named Jack, who Myers met on a motorcycle trip through Wisconsin in early June. Jack suffers from a rare genetic disease, and his situation highlights the dangers proposed by the pending bill, which would end his medical treatments.

“I was born with this pre-existing condition that makes me have no antibodies. It’s called Bruton’s X-Linked Agammaglobulinemia, or XLA,” said Jack. When asked what would happen if he lost his health care, he added, “Basically, I dіе.”